Tag Archives: stress

Trigger Warning: topic includes some discussion on self-harm, suicidal, and homicidal urges.

Lately I’ve been trying to do a better job of understanding the urges I feel and how they fit with my symptoms. Living with treatment resistant bipolar disorder has meant that even though I find myself having the sorts of urges everyone else seems to (though as human beings we all seem quite reluctant to talk about urges) I also experience urges brought on by my illness. On top of that, my ability to respond to these urges can be quite compromised based on what my symptoms are doing as well… but let’s back up for a second.

Urges are impulses. Strong desires. They are those feelings inside of us that scream out to “just do it” in certain situations. Sometimes my urges come only in the form of a feeling like gravity taking over and I act on them without thinking, sometimes they’re accompanied with thoughts that can encourage or discourage following an urge.

To break it down, here’s an example of a relatively healthy urge I have. A simple craving.

Urge: make eggs.Thought: I do like to eat eggs.Action: made eggs.

You can substitute chocolate in for eggs, chocolate is good. Or you could substitute tea, in which case the urge and actions become blurrier for me because I have dietary restrictions. In that situation having a chai tea latte, for example, becomes something I shouldn’t do. I will get sick if I have dairy, so the urge has a negative consequence –it becomes unhealthy.

Urge: drink a chai tea!Thought: holy yum batman, but this will make me sick (Reminder: I can’t have milk or caffeine).Action: urge denied, drank juice.

Even though drinking a chai tea is unhealthy for me, there are times when I am run down or worn out where the negative consequences of drinking one sort of fade out. In that kind of situation I find my thoughts work against me.

Urge: for pumpkin spice’s sake, drink a chai tea!Thought: It is fall, I do like chai, and even if I get disgustingly bloaty and gassy and can’t leave my house for two days I don’t have any plans anyway.Action: 20 minutes of sweet, sweet chai tea action, 48 hours of intestinal horror.

Finally, there are those situations where thinking doesn’t even come into play (I swear, I have a point here). If someone put the chai tea in my hand and told me to drink it, the impulse becomes much easier to carry out.

Urge: drink this chai tea in your hand!Action: yes, thanks.

Alright, so this seems perfectly reasonable to understand when I am thinking about something mundane but delicious, like breakfast… but these same scenarios are true for most types of urges I encounter. As human beings, we come up against a lot of kinds of urges, but the ones I want to look at more specifically are the negative urges, the ones that we know will have (or are likely to have) negative consequences. Things like lying, cheating, stealing, violence, sexual attraction to inappropriate parties, overeating, overuse of drugs or alcohol, self-harm, and suicide (to name just a few).

Most of the things I’ve listed are not things people talk openly about despite how commonly we find ourselves feeling urges to do negative things. I’m sure there are people who excel at shooting down these urges, but I don’t think it is very clear cut. If my chai tea was now an act of violence (let’s say slapping someone in the face who had done something inappropriate), even a totally rational person might not deny the urge after several drinks.

Urge: that bitch just threw a drink in your face! Slap her!Thought: I’m the bigger person here… she looks ridiculous, I can let it lie.Action: deny urge, stand around dripping.

(But after several drinks, or a bad day, or after something particularly offensive like groping your partner…)

Urge: oh no she didn’t, slap her!Action: slapping.

I’d say that, more than anything else, is why I don’t drink anymore. My mind, for whatever reason, seems fully capable of jumping from urge to action without being intoxicated.

Anyway, last example. Living with treatment resistant bipolar disorder has often meant living with suicidal urges on a regular basis, and this is one aspect of my illness that I think people understand least. You see, these urges are something I can typically rationalize away.

Urge: you should kill yourself.Thought: I might not feel good right now but I’ll bounce back. Plus that sounds like a lot of work. Plus what about my dog? Plus I think people might get upset.Action: still alive, despite lack of chai tea lattes.

But, as I mentioned with my chai example above, if I find myself in a position where extreme stress or a particularly long depressive episode has eroded my ability to think clearly, the urge becomes harder to contradict.

Urge: you really should kill yourself.Thought: you’ve been pushing that nonstop for months, and I’m sure there is a reason I have resisted that urge in the past even if I can’t quite remember it now. I’d better call someone.Action: call my therapist, she acts as a rational brain for me when mine isn’t working.

Then there are situations that I call “level 3” suicidality, and that is when hospitalization becomes required because the urge has consumed any ability to contradict with thought.

Urge: kill yourself.Action: jaywalk, check into the ER.

I know it isn’t a pretty topic, I’m sure that is why it goes unmentioned most of the time. Just the fact that I spent so many years not knowing where the urges I felt were coming from or that they did not mean immediate suicide, or violence, or self-harm, that I still had a choice as to whether I would act on them or not, was exceptionally confusing and wildly detrimental to my sense of self-worth. On top of that, not knowing what kind of situations (alcohol, mania/mixed episodes, high stress) led me to jump from an urge to an action without thinking made it really hard for me to stop acting on the urges I felt.

Being unable to separate the urges I felt from the totality of who I thought I was meant years of trying to punish myself for urges I could not control in an effort to curb them because I assumed that “getting better” meant not having those horrible feelings anymore. Besides, urges that provide harmful consequences are not generally seen as normal in our communities despite how often people experience them because the topic is typically taboo. Needless to say, when I was sixteen and experiencing psychosis with homicidal urges I immediately assumed I was a terrible person who probably didn’t deserve to live, given the fact that I wanted so desperately to hurt other people. Even though I worked hard to deny those urges I still felt wildly ashamed for having those urges in the first place.

I still catch myself sometimes, telling myself that the urges I feel to self-harm or commit suicide mean I am something less that others, that it doesn’t matter how many worms on the sidewalk I frantically save from being walked on because overall I’m a terrible person.

But that simply isn’t true. (And I’m sure the worms do appreciate it in their own way.)

I can’t judge myself based on the urges I feel because doing so is like judging an entire library because one book doesn’t seem to get shelved properly on a regular basis. To discredit the entire system and collection because of one book seems absurd, especially once I’ve learned that there are many creative solutions for where to keep that book in the catalog.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve started to understand that everyone feels urges and that urges are outside of our control. We might not all feel the same ones, but I’m sure we’ve all felt an urge now and again we have felt ashamed of. Being able to take a step back from that shame has meant feeling better about myself and even though I don’t expect those urges to go away anymore, I just try to focus on the way I view the urge and how I choose to act when it comes up.

Living with treatment resistant bipolar disorder can be really frustrating, not just for me but also for those around me. With symptoms that have responded atypically (either worsening or not resolving and accompanied by outrageous side effects) to the traditional route of pharmaceuticals normally used to treat bipolar disorder I have to shift all of my focus onto using skills to help keep me calm and rational.

Even doing everything I have encountered; things like meditation, dialectical behavioral therapy skills, living openly about my illness and asking for help when I can, paying close attention to my diet, sleep, and exercise, -that bipolar spark in my brain remains elusive and unchecked. Under the right conditions, my big mood shifts can happen in whatever direction they choose and I find myself along for the ride.

Lately I’ve been seeing that frustration growing in my healthcare team. In the last two months I’ve been taking a significant shift into depression, enough that both my therapist and new psychiatrist (of about 6 months) have become edgy. My therapist let slip that, “well you would think something should be helping by now!” and my psychiatrist sat, horror-stricken, when I replied to her question about what we should do about my depression with, “well the past few years nothing has worked so we typically watch and wait, requiring hospitalization as necessary until the episode ends.”

Unacceptable!

Maybe so, but it is my life. As much as I dislike being subject to frequent mood swings and psychosis I have reached the point of feeling some form of acceptance over my situation. I can’t throw a fit (though sometimes I do) every time a new treatment option doesn’t go my way, but the slightly pissy attitudes of my healthcare team the past few weeks has initiated something of a domino effect kicking people into gear.

On one hand, it feels nice to know that my psychiatrist feels inspired to do everything she can to try to help me. On the other, after a constant barrage of negative outcomes from medication after medication the past few years I am pretty familiar with how it can feel to be a guinea pig. I’m not saying I am opposed to new options, quite the opposite. I want to keep trying, I want to move toward a life that is stable and more functional, I just need to find a balance where I can do that and not have to be pulled along in the wake of each drug that’s had a negative effect without being able to take a break. When psychiatrists take me on it can be easy for them to look at me as a sort of challenge and they feel eager to throw everything at me they can think of right away without giving me time to recover. It has tended to make me both more physically and mentally sick while this is occurring, so it is important that I can balance pursuing new treatment options and living some of the life I am working to improve.

After how hard it was cycling through medications the last go around (2010-2015) I have been floating around using my cognitive skills and sitting tight taking Lithium that isn’t helping. I have actually been doing better without the barrage of new drugs constantly eroding my mental and physical health, so I have just kind of been waiting for the right doctor, or something new to come on the market, or for things to get rough enough to push me back into feeling willing to roll the dice again.

I wouldn’t normally consider my current state of depression severe enough to make me desperate enough to move back into that place of uncertainty, but last week my boyfriend was gone for 8 days and I was really concerned about being home alone that whole time and having the added stress of taking care of our sick dog on my own.

My new psychiatrist is focusing on making tiny changes in medications (hoping that my big reactions to regular doses might be mitigated by tiny doses) and trying things that have a low chance for making my overall health worse.

We started with a huge increase in my fish oil consumption, up to 2400 mg daily of highly concentrated oil (with a bunch of other specific properties I can’t quite recall). I couldn’t tell if it was helping while my boyfriend was out of town, but I didn’t feel worse, so for depression that was causing me to steadily deteriorate that may have been enough to give me a more level playing field last week.

If the fish oil was helping keep me from sliding further into depression, the plan went to hell a little bit when my boyfriend came home from his trip with a broken shoulder. The immediate jump in stress level left me plummeting and I was frantic this week trying to take care of him, and the sick dog, AND me.

I found myself in a situation where I can’t really afford to be screaming at my neighbors or paranoid out of my mind at the grocery store so I called my psychiatrist and agreed to try an antidepressant again.

I tried Zoloft a few years ago in a similar situation and was manic within a couple days. My boyfriend found me feeling high out of my mind in our apartment jumping around uncontrollably and he thankfully had the frame of mind to point out to me that I was acting a little strange.

Naturally, the idea of taking an antidepressant isn’t one I’m too keen on (I’ve had several mixed or manic reactions over the years to them) but I find my psychiatrist’s theory about trying the tiniest little bit to be intriguing, mostly because I’ve had the same thought myself and anytime I’ve brought it up to a doctor before (or my sensitivities to medications) they always just prescribed a regular dose anyway.

Yesterday I tried 1/8 the dosage of Zoloft as I did the first time around. 12.5 mg, half of a 25 mg pill that is so small I keep losing them. I was able to sleep (which is a good sign) so I expect to keep this up and see if anything happens.

The last two weeks has been a whirlwind as my boyfriend and I were faced with a family member who was in a near-death situation. I found myself sitting in one of the biggest role reversals our relationship has seen so far; stepping down as the supported and stepping up as the supporter.

I knew that this was a situation I would find myself in eventually, and it is something that has happened a few times on a much smaller scale before. Still, being in a position where my spotty depression brain this month was the more stable of the two of us (legit) made for a very stressful and confusing time.

While it has been many years since I stepped in the role of supporter for any prolonged period I have a lot of experience doing it. I grew up around a lot of instability which lent me to put most of my effort into being the rock for the people around me. I didn’t allow myself time or room to express my own emotions because I didn’t want to further upset the people I was trying to support.

Beyond that, my supporter resume remained equally as mentally and emotionally unhealthy when I found myself in a relationship with a guy whose instabilities often overshadowed my own in frequency. By the time this started taking place my bipolar symptoms were starting to make more and more of an appearance, eventually exploding through the seemingly supportive facade I had built up. As I expected as a child, my emotions + his emotions = a horror story.

I had forgotten most of this until two weeks ago when I put on my supporter hat, strapped on my supporter boots, and waited, poised, to be told how I could help in the situation. Before long I found myself settling into old patterns, completely overburdening myself with things, giving my self little leeway in terms of completing tasks when I thought they should be finished, and providing no outlet for my own emotional responses to the situation. Within days I could feel myself starting to crack under the pressure, my depression got seriously worse. I was having psychosis on and off. My DBT binder sat under a pile of clothes as I did my best to prepare meals and clean up and take care of our dog without sleeping.

I knew it wasn’t working. Within the first day I knew I couldn’t keep it up for very long. My emotions could not be contained under such a thin shroud of good intentions.

But… sometimes, when I am under a lot of stress or facing intense emotions (like mania or depression) all the framework for strategy falls away. An all-consuming fog makes it extremely difficult to know what to do next, or what I should do, or even what my options are. Even though I knew what I was doing wasn’t working, I was having the damndest time trying to figure out if there was something I could do different.

Luckily I have a scheduled weekly time I spend around a couple understanding friends. Pulling myself away from the apartment after 5 days of turmoil, they made me laugh just enough to help the fog lift.

Right. Taking care of Corey was helpful, but futile if I wasn’t able to also take care of myself. Frankly, at this point in my life I spend almost every waking moment working at taking care of myself, smoothing out the rough emotional corners with routines, self-soothing or distracting myself when I need it, going to therapy and DBT group and seeing my friends each week to help take some of that ever-growing internal pressure off. I hadn’t been doing any of those things, and it wasn’t until I’d stumbled back into part of my routine that I realized how much I missed it.

At times I can be very single minded, if I start on a task it consumes me. Supporting Corey was no different, and while my therapist praised me for even noticing that I had fallen into that single minded place (from one of trying to take care of my own needs) I didn’t want to hear it. It didn’t feel like enough. It didn’t answer my question of how to be a supporter of both my boyfriend and myself at the same time.

This week things are finally starting to cool down. I got through things by grappling my way from one familiar point (like dinner with my friends) to another, despite how sparse those instances felt. I did my best to try to ask for help when I needed it (even though I have a hard time with it), and I cancelled several plans as well which was difficult (I hate feeling like a flake) but totally necessary in this situation.

Even though I don’t feel like I had any moments of clarity, any real understanding of how to position the elements in my life to enable me to be more fully a supporter and supported simultaneously I would like to think that down the road this situation will have taught me something, even if it is something I don’t fully recognize yet.

I’m sure it might sound greedy to yearn for immediate full understanding (yes please!) but as I get older I find I appreciate the sort of understanding that comes with time more and more. Since this situation didn’t lend itself to the former, I’m hoping for the latter.

Like most people, when you hear the word depression you probably associate it with emotion. Sadness, perhaps, if you’ve never had it yourself. Despair, even, if that is something you’ve come face to face with. I know when I hear the word depression it is easy for my mind to make an association jumping straight to utter and complete hopelessness, or going a week without leaving the house, or even suicidality.

However, the truth of the matter is that depression has many symptoms associated with it that may not directly involve feeling sad or hopeless at all, and it is this odd grey area that I’ve found myself in lately.

Though I haven’t been having feelings of despair (profound or otherwise) I am definitely feeling exhausted all the time. I am more anxious than usual and having a hard time being in public places. I am less motivated and less interested in things, and I keep bouncing back and forth between wanting to eat everything I can get my hands on and not having an appetite at all.

But, despite all of these things, my first reaction when I saw my therapist last was to say things were going well. It wasn’t until she asked about my appetite and sleeping that I started noticing all of the other (emotionless?) symptoms of depression have been stacking up, but without that emotional sort of sinking feeling they’ve all latched onto me under the radar.

Once I noticed it I felt a little silly for not noticing it before. After all, I consider myself pretty experienced with depression’s escapades at this point and beyond that, there are plenty of times I have had symptoms of mania come on without the bliss or agitation I normally associate with it. Things like increased energy, impulsivity, lack of appetite and sleep, have been pretty easy for me to notice, but something like decreased energy could be any number of things from my immune system to stress to the weather. It isn’t until I can see all of those symptoms together that I am willing to start labeling them.

I guess I am hoping that since my stress level should (that’s the key word) be letting up in the next couple weeks I can simply play hostess and seat these other symptoms at a table while they wait for their friend emotion to arrive. If I’m lucky it’ll get stuck in traffic or be too sad to come to the party, and if not I will have my wait staff ready to do what needs to be done to keep things afloat.

With the new year fast approaching I am excited to say that I will be starting 2016 with a new therapist and a new psychiatrist. I will also be continuing the DBT group I have been participating in for a couple months now which is great because so far I would say it has been helping me make a difference in my reactivity and emotional rumination.

Of course, it helps that Emotional Regulation was the first thing we covered because that is one of the more challenging things I have been facing. The funny thing is that now that I’ve got a few skills to help me see the big picture (instead of a pure emotional reaction) in situations it has been made clear that my other biggest challenge is communication and Interpersonal Relationships. That module of the group definitely can’t come soon enough!

That doesn’t mean I am miraculously cured, or that I am not continuing to lose my shit on a semi-regular basis. But… I may lose it for a shorter period of time, or only two or three times (instead of 12-16). Frankly I am willing to consider any and all progress progress.

Ultimately the way my perspective has been shifting around because of this class highlights an issue that I’ve known for a while but may not have given enough credit to. Stress makes a huge difference, in terms of the timing and magnitude of a lot of my emotional episodes. Stress is like… my death star. I might think it is a friendly moon at first but really it is a fully operational space station of mass destruction.

What does that mean, exactly? I am not sure, but I know I need to be addressing stress more aggressively (eh, not me being aggressive but more seriously) and not fail to recognize it or deal with it before all the firing sequences have been completed and it becomes a giant laser heading straight for me.

I can’t control the stress, but I am hoping that if I can recognize it early enough there will be time for me to react before the laser hits the fan.

Anyway, even with the intense illness and surgeries of 2015, spending summer in bed, and most of my plans being totally pulled out from under me this was somehow a better year than 2014. While 2014 was almost a year of being comical because of how many things could go wrong, 2015 was great because “at least it isn’t 2014.”

I don’t know if it was because I spent 2014 operating on a totally empty tank but this year it was like I could feel parts of my brain beginning to operate that hadn’t been used in ages. I can’t make a final word as to if I should be chalking that up to hypomania or simply 2014 acting as a hard-reset of my brain but it leaves me hopeful that in 2016 I might be able to dust off a few more parts and put them to good use again. We’ll see.

Ultimately, this year I learned that there is still a lot of improvement to be had in terms of the treatment of people with mental illness and mental health crisis. It bewildered me that so many people were willing to reach out and to respect my space when I was having surgery (for a physical problem), but the treatment I have received both just having a mental health problem or during a mental health crisis is wildly different. I am hoping that going forward I can learn and discern new or better ways to communicate this problem and what we can all do to help solve it.

In the mean time, however, I will wish you all a happy new year! Thanks for reading!

I can say with some certainty that November and December have become my least favorite times of the year. For a long time I thought the stagnant months of February and March were worse (as they hold the record for the majority of my psychiatric hospitalizations) but it seems that every big blow-out started with a seed of intense stress in November and December.

Last week was really rough. Our dog Luna has been having seizures that our local vet has been having a hard time getting under control, and combined with the stresses and pressures of the holidays I started to crack very quickly. It started with really intense insomnia, and waking up psychotic around 4 or 5 am each morning for three days in a row. By the third day I had put on boots and a coat and walked to the grocery store outside in the dark in an attempt to outrun the vibrating energy in my body as I was filled with unprompted rage, and then the walk back tipped the scales in the other direction. Uncontrollable crying.

The swings were intense, on the brink of hospitalization-worthy. After having the ten-minutes-of-rage, ten-minutes-of-despair, ten-minutes of clarity, (wash, rinse, repeat) for a couple hours Corey and I decided it would be best to start the day with my emergency antipsychotic (Risperidone). 15 hours of sleep later I was a little more evened out, but it was a very serious sign to relax and take things more slowly. The last thing I wanted was to spend the holidays (and the new Star Wars premier) in the hospital.

One of the biggest difficulties I have at this time of year is that all of the progress my various family members have made regarding understanding my illness seems to evaporate (I am chalking it up to holiday stress, I don’t think they mean to do it) and things seem to reset to a time where I had little to no control over what I was doing or where I was spending my time.

It is often very hard for me to communicate my needs when it comes to managing bipolar disorder, but the problem always seems to grow exponentially around the holidays. It can feel really frustrating (to say the least) when my actions attempting to keep myself safe and sane start being ignored or demeaned when my needs start being categorized as selfish wants or irrelevant to the success of a holiday gathering.

I come from a long line of people who are much more quick to accommodate others than accommodate ourselves, and I think my Grandma said it best to me when she told me recently, “I always put my family’s needs before my own.” While this is something I have admired about us (lending itself to being giving and compassionate) one of the most difficult aspects of my life up to this point has been watching the people I love not taking care of themselves and feeling helpless to do anything about it.

At times it seems like my desire to take better care of myself is seen as an insult to my family when it has nothing to do with any of them. That is why I have had a whole series of Christmases where I made plans, and then always disrupted them at the last minute to do whatever whichever family member wants. These are people that really matter to me, and the shame and guilt I end of up feeling about not letting them control me is usually enough for me to give in. I don’t want to disappoint them, and I find myself traveling back to being a teenager or a kid who would rather just forgo helping myself and hide that I ever needed anything at all to keep from feeling vulnerable and like a disappointment.

Obviously that is a big part of what got me into this mess in the first place. Not taking care of myself when I really needed it has made my bipolar symptoms much bigger and stronger over time, and now that I am finally at that point where I am (making a good attempt at) managing my symptoms with a lot of help from my friends, things seem to be improving -albeit slowly.

Yesterday after a significant struggle through some knee deep inner turmoil I had a lightbulb go off. After the episode of this last week and all of the family conversations I had it was clear that taking care of myself has finally outweighed pleasing my family.

Like I said, I love them and I want them to be happy, but this doesn’t have to do with me being selfish, or my own happiness, or trying to punish them for not accommodating me, or just not wanting to be around them. This is about my health. My sanity. My brain is a pretty integral part of my daily living, so it’d be better if I gave it a hand here, you know?

Putting my family first doesn’t keep me from having bipolar episodes. It doesn’t help me cope with stress. It doesn’t let me live the life that I want to live because I am not living through them, I am living through me. It took me many years to learn that I could not take care of them when they were failing to take care of themselves, but taking care of me is the one thing I can do.

My needs are important and they can’t be ignored any longer. I am thirty years old now, and it is crystal clear that nobody is going to take care of me but me. That means I need to step up and do it all the way, not just a little bit here and there.

This doesn’t mean I am becoming a hermit, it simply means that what I want is going to have to agree with what is appropriate for my health before I do it, and the execution will involve a firm “no” (gasp!!) from time to time.

I’ve spent ten years trying to execute this plan and failed every time before now, but I am finally able to see that the old way… well it isn’t working. While I recognize that this is always easier said than done I can feel that guilt and shame window closing. I am tired of being ruled by my emotions, because emotions can be manipulated. I want my life to be about the things that are important to me, and while my family is important I am finally recognizing just how important my health is to me too.

Lately things have been up, up, up! A rather profound and relatively welcome change from my typical morose malaise dragging down even the most cheerful of moments. Things seemed to be going perfectly well when I hit a bit of a speed bump last week and started noticing my slightly-elevated hypomania (and general stability) being peppered with hysteria riddled buckshot.

Right now in the DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) group I am in we are learning about a skill called check the facts which involves taking time out to look at the big picture and discern if my reaction to events (or if my interpretation) might be colored by unwise reasoning (like jumping to conclusions).

I felt like I had a pretty good grasp on the skill and practiced it multiple times before that speed bump I was talking about last week. In these periods of agitation and intense depression-laced moments (lasting a couple hours at a time) I could no longer find “the facts”. It seemed like my ability to step back was totally negated, adding fear and panic to my already disoriented state.

I have always had a hard time identifying psychosis when it is happening, or at least identifying it before it has altered my psyche in a profound way. Typically the only way I have been able to pinpoint it in the past was after the fact, faced with a trail of breadcrumbs leading in several opposing directions at once.

Granted, I have experienced a few situations where the psychosis I was experiencing was something that seemed pretty easy to point out at the time. The overwhelming need I had to live with gypsies and time I thought I had become a werewolf are definitely two examples, but both occurred many years ago. Since then things have changed, and the psychosis I experience now is almost exclusively tied to fear, not euphoria or grandeur.

The fears are almost always something that could happen. Typically not things that are likely, but possible in the realm of actual life events. My boss trying to undermine me at work was a pretty infamous episode I had, but this time it was a little closer to home and my fear revolved around my boyfriend and an impending doom of our relationship.

In my mind, my boyfriend was trying to push me away to the point where I would become fed up with him and break up. Though this is not even remotely based in reality I was certain it was happening (but only for 1-2 hours 3-4 times a day) and I became terrified to speak to him. Unfortunately not speaking to him only fed into the awkward feeling I was having, making the whole thing seem more real.

For me, psychosis is typically like a real asshole lawyer. It builds a case based on tiny clues that are generally considered meaningless in our everyday lives, and when there are big pieces missing to corroborate the story, it makes them up. I’ll often find myself with memories of saying or hearing things that never actually happened, despite feeling very much like they have.

Trying to reason with someone who isn’t playing by the rules (psychosis) became relatively meaningless in my experience this last week. I felt overwhelmed by mass confusion because trying to check the facts led to so many contradictory facts that I didn’t know who or what to believe.

And that’s when my boyfriend found me.

I tried to explain why I was upset (without knowing at that point that I was even experiencing psychosis). It didn’t seem like him to be vindictive or evil, after all our relationship had always been like a slow, lazy river as opposed to the Niagara Falls of my last relationship. I blamed him for a long list of things that apparently never happened, and when trying to express my confusion I suddenly started laughing. Yep. That’s when I figured it out, the contradictory breadcrumbs were coming from many different directions and were made of several individually delicious but totally different and clashing baked goods.

[insert emergency antipsychotic here]

Things have been fine since, and while these sorts of episodes always lead me to feeling rather embarrassed and apologetic I was very lucky that I had some help in pinpointing this situation early. Being able to celebrate my birthday over the weekend without any added psychosis was huge.

Corey reminded me that this sort of thing tends to crop up for me when I am starting to get stressed. It was a good reminder to pay attention this holiday season and do my best to remain relaxed. I never want to come off as being a “Scrooge” but finding a way to celebrate the holidays without totally losing control of myself can be a big challenge. High-five to my man for being smart and compassionate!

On a final note, I am in the market for a new psychiatrist. This last one has made some comments that were more harmful than helpful, so this week I hope to switch to the next doctor on deck. Stay tuned!